Death comes to dinner at the Duke of Mersham's, and so does a confidant of the new German chancellor Adolf Hitler, in this ingeniously crafted mystery novel set against the background of Anglo-German relations in the summer of 1935. Among the other guests at the duke's influential table are a pacifist bishop, a womanizing politician, a Canadian press lord and his troublesome daughter, and one of the duke's oldest friends-a man vehemently opposed to any accommodation on the part of the English to Hitler's regime-General Sir Alistair Craig VC. It is over the duke's excellent port that death strikes first, when the general may have mistaken a cyanide pill for his medication. The mystery behind the general's unanticipated death intrigues and challenges both Lord Edward Corinth, the duke's younger brother, and Verity Brown, a resourceful young journalist who has come to interview the duchess supposedly for Country Life but in reality for the communist Daily Worker. An unlikely pair, this scion of the aristocracy and young woman passionately committed to social justice cross their class lines and combine their considerable resources to uncover the cause of Sir Alistair's death-only to discover that virtually every guest, and the duke himself, had reason to want the general dead. Death meanwhile strikes again. And again. And this shrewd whodunit will keep readers guessing to the very end.